October, long ago, a dusky evening. Dugout canoes rest on the beach; wood smoke drifts over the bay from the cooking fires where salmon dry at this seasonal camp; cattail sheets create beachside shelters. Waves lap along the shoreline as a young man and his dog returned from the headlands nearby. The waters, beaches, forests, and fields have fed these peoples since time immemorial.
October, in the late Forties. The Department of Fisheries has recently dredged the Bay filling the wetland to make a level field for hatchery tanks to raise fish. To protect this new field, they bury the beach in boulders, armoring the shoreline against future storm waves. They built a wooden pier out into the bay to ship the hatchery fish all around the state.
October 15, 2015. After years of advocating for funding to replace the rock rip rap with a natural beach, it finally happened! The boulders were removed and replaced with natural beach gravels and anchored with large tree trunks to help stabilize the beach in case of storms. In time, the planners said, it would look like a real beach again.
October 16, 2015. Right on cue, a fierce gale blew directly into Bowman Bay that next morning. All the gravels and carefully placed logs were scattered and rearranged into a natural beach. Mother Nature had the final say in how the beach could look, and she didn’t take long. And she did a pretty good job. Through the years, with volunteers planting native beachside and upland vegetation, and storms reshaping the beach into a typical shoreline as it once was and could be again, Bowman Bay began to look like it did centuries ago.
October 15, 2024. Nine years later, that natural beauty has matured into a healthy, beautiful, scenic, and natural coastline that reminds us of how it had looked Once Upon a Time, since time immemorial. Our planet can be restored.
I walked south along the beach, a heron wading slowly in the dark waters. A thick wrack line of seaweeds and salt plants mingled at the high tide line. Driftwood lay scattered like tinker toys arranged artistically. The beautiful and healthy shoreline now has mature shrubs and saplings behind as a backshore, a backstop for future storms.
I walked the low tide line to Lottie Bay and its sandy expanse on one side, and its deep mud on the other side of the isthmus. The mud lay buried under a fresh blanket of sea lettuce at slack water. Kingfishers clacked from tree to tree; seagulls fed on shorecrabs stranded high and dry at low tide. A small rocky headland revealed a grassy playpen for river otters; Murphy tried to sample the scat they left behind.
On this October day, just a few people walked the trails and beaches. Waters still lapped gently. All was quiet, the hush of fall felt like a cozy coat after the heat and hubbub of the now-distant summer days. I circled back over the headland, back to the parking lot built on the fill dredged from the bay. A heron circled back and waited patiently again for lunch to swim by.Bowman Bay has circled back too.Jack
Directions
Directions: From the Deception Pass Bridge, drive north a quarter mile, turn left on Rosario Road, and immediately turn left again to descend down to Bowman Bay. I parked at the south parking lot and walked south from there.
By Bike: Highway 20 can be unnerving to cycle from the bridge north to Rosario Road, or along Rosario Road. But it can be done, carefully.
Mobility: The trail at Bowman Bay is flat hardpacked gravel. Beyond the bay, the trail is rocky, hilly, narrow, and follows a cliff edge in a couple places. The beaches range from gravelly to sandy to muddy depending on which beach you are at.
Republished with permission. Read the original article.